Evangelicals (31%) aren’t a majority of Hoosier voters, citizens or Christians (72%), but act like they are a super-majority. There are (thankfully fewer) people like right-wing preacher/former GOP candidate Micah Beckwith. God, he claims, speaks w/Beckwith often. 1/10

Christians have a bad history of discriminating against each other. As recently 8/14/60, Eugene C Pulliam, publisher of The Indianapolis Star, wrote: “Why won’t Jack Kennedy be frank enough to admit publicly that it was his Catholic friends who gave him the nomination?” 2/10

Preachers demean those who baptize “by sprinkling” vs complete immersion & remind one of “Gulliver’s Travels” (how to crack one’s egg). Purple for Parents Indiana (“PPI”) is a group steeped in right wing Christianity & warn against the evils of CRT & SEL. 3/10

Florida: CRT teaches racism isn’t a product of prejudice but “embedded in our society & legal systems to uphold supremacy of white persons.” Euphemisms describe slavery in The Constitution (3/5 of all other persons (Art. I, § 2); Import of Persons (Art. I, §9).) 4/10

SEL is “Social Emotional Learning”: children/adults acquire/apply knowl & skills 2 understand & manage emotions, set/achieve + goals, feel/show empathy, make/maintain + relationships & responsible decisions. (Website: Social and Emotional Learning Alliance for Indiana.) 5/10

SEL is learning “to put yourself in the shoes of another person who may be from a different background or culture from the one you grew up with. To act with empathy and in an ethical manner within your home, school, and community.” This is important. 6/10

Suicide is the 2nd leading cause of death among young ppl (CDControl, 2020), w/LGBTQ youth being 4x more likely to seriously consider/make a plan for/& to attempt suicide than their peers (Johns et al., 2019; Johns et al., 2020). PPI is intolerant of tolerance. 7/10

A PPI Facebook post links to several items betw sentence fragments (including: “The Southern Poverty Law Center’s Teaching Tolerance”) & seems consistent w/views of Tony Perkins, pres of the evangelical (FRC), who sees no correlation betw inacceptance ... 8/10

of homosexuality (he calls it “abnormal”) & depression/suicide, but that LGBTQ students have higher propensity 2 depression/suicide because of internal conflict. (WFYI, 10/26/10.) PPI is 2 faced if it says schools shouldn’t teach values, but would have ITS values taught. 9/10

The same cohort that produced Jimmy Swaggert, et al, wants to dictate the teaching of morals in our public schools. We need to say “No.” I’m Mark Small. I’m pro-choice, pro environment & GOP candidate for Indiana House District 86. I approve of this blog. Hell, I wrote it. 10/10